


Blood Bound

by daredevilmoon



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, The Great War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1259335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daredevilmoon/pseuds/daredevilmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thomas thinks on the war and comes away with a strange burden of knowledge. </p><p> <i>Neither the living nor the dead were to his taste.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Bound

The realisation dawned upon Thomas with the sun, each casting their seemingly entwined glances upon him before he was engulfed.

After having mistaken his cot for a trench one hour too long, he’d forfeited the idea of sleeping any longer and had sat smoking in the dark, until both memory of his dreams and the day fell upon him.

That god-awful stench, sharp and putrid all at once, of corpses outnumbering gunfire; the feeling of clotted blood covering his hands, of the soft give of spilled organs beneath his hands; the deafening barrage which made the most reasonable men sure that that was the sound of the end of the world.

Thomas wasn’t, and hadn’t been, one of those shell-shocked ex-soldiers who gibbered or shrieked or locked themselves in. Even so, he had an idea that the war still lived on in the dreams of most of the men who’d gone through it the first time.

The dream hadn’t been the worst - it felt like a thaumotrope, spinning things into one another and blending them in infinite repetition. He’d been unable to go over, the mud kept gripping him or forcing him back, but presented no such problems for his comrades. One by one, they fell back in mangled piles, stacking around him until they were high enough for them to be used as leverage in his getting over the top. Then there was nothing, the shock of his own heart beating as he awoke.

The faces of the fallen circulated in his waking mind - he wondered at who he’d killed erroneously. Thomas’s brows furrowed in something akin to worry as he thought of one in particular whose dreamed fate had been probably cleaner than his reality. Kent.

The men tended to blur together, unless he was friendly with them or disliked them particularly. He didn’t keep up with many of the survivors; none regularly. He tended to keep the living as buried as the dead. Indeed, typically moreso; he couldn’t help his waking mind from flitting back to that Lieutenant and dropping the fact of his suicide into Thomas’s guts like a lead weight.

Neither the living nor the dead were to his taste.

Indeed, particularly not Kent.

He didn’t know what to do with the information his dream had bestowed upon him, whether it was kinder to make mention of it or not. The thought crept over him that it was, whether or not he enlightened Jimmy, another binding tie, despite Jimmy not having purposely extended his end.

In all honestly, he’d more been aware of Jimmy’s father than strictly knew him. He didn’t know that they had ever spoken, though Thomas had heard through people the funny things the man had said. Skirting boisterousness was the impression Thomas had gleaned first-hand. He wasn’t sure if he had liked him.

He’d gotten a bullet to the throat, enough to have left him dead by the time the stretcher bearers had gotten to him. The black blood covering his hands like gloves had, however, confirmed a suspicion that it hadn’t been as quick a death as one would hope for.

That thought was the one that Thomas carried down to breakfast with him. Seeing Jimmy at the table, so very alive, greeting him with a happy smile which Thomas had found only bestowed upon him - he wasn’t going to say. Who was he to dim so rare a sun with the knowledge of what his father’s blood had felt like on Thomas’s skin?

Maybe years on - then, when he caught himself in that fancy, he altered it some.

Maybe years on, with Jimmy a little the dimmer for life, they would meet over a pint. The one would turn into several, and once their words had turned to the war like old soldiers’ tended to do after too many fallen brothers were lined upon the table, he’d tell him of another fragment of their blasted history.


End file.
